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In celebration of the fifth year anniversary of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, we ask authors of some of our most impactful articles (with respect to news stories, social media engagement, Altmetric scores, citations, policy mentions and article accesses) to reflect on the successes of their Reviews.

Five years of experimental warming on the Tibetan Plateau reveals a permafrost tipping point at 2–4 °C. Deep carbon is released faster than plants can capture it, transforming ecosystems into strong carbon sources that intensify climate change.

Global mean vegetation greenness reached a record high in the year 2025, extending the multi-decadal upward trend. A total of 68.2% of vegetated land surfaces experienced greening, particularly in grasslands and croplands in the Southern Hemisphere and in northern mid-latitudes.

The depiction of crop exposure to heat stress is fundamental for reliably quantifying extreme-heat-induced yield loss and crop failure. Using more than 130,000 subnational yield records, this study estimated spatially explicit extreme degree day thresholds for maize and soybean across major Northern Hemisphere breadbaskets, revealing strong geographic heterogeneity.

Recent warming has significantly advanced leaf onset in the northern hemisphere. Here, the authors show asymmetric effects of daytime and nighttime temperature change on the timing of leaf onset.

The authors consider the changing sensitivity of the leaf-onset date to temperature (S_T) for boreal deciduous broadleaf forests. S_T increased between 1982–1996 and 1998–2012—potentially linked to enhanced chilling accumulation—but this increase is underestimated in phenology models.

Shifts in phenology can significantly impact organism fitness, ecosystem function, and the provision of ecosystem goods and services. Through a global meta-analysis, this study shows how shifts in the timing of leaf-out and first flowering due to warming and precipitation changes depend on plant functional group and climate region.

China has tremendous climatic and ecological diversity, so the impacts of climate change on natural and managed systems might likewise be expected to be diverse. Yet so far systematic studies have been rare. Here, the impacts of historical and future climate change on water resources and agriculture in China are assessed. Despite clear trends in climate, the overall impacts are overshadowed by natural variability and uncertainties in crop responses and projected climate, especially precipitation.

Spring leaf unfolding has been occurring earlier in the year because of rising temperatures; however, long-term evidence in the field from 7 European tree species studied in 1,245 sites shows that this early unfolding effect is being reduced in recent years, possibly because the reducing chilling and/or insolation render trees less responsive to warming.

In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.

The extreme hot and dry conditions of 2023 reduced soil respiration and enhanced net forest carbon sequestration in Canada, offsetting wildfire emissions, according to satellite-based and in situ observations of CO₂ fluxes.

Global potential forestation currently increases runoff in tropical regions but reduces it in boreal regions, such latitudinal divergence is driven mainly by forest-atmosphere feedbacks rather than direct effects of forest expansion.

The terrestrial carbon flux—sources and sinks—under land-use change (LUC) is difficult to quantify. Here, using a LUC dataset drawing on remote sensing and forest inventory data, the authors show that in China the carbon sink from LUC (such as afforestation) may be underestimated.

Northern Hemisphere photosynthesis is thought to respond positively to temperature variations, yet the strength of this relationship may change over time. Here, using a combination of satellite data and models, the authors assess the temporal change of this relationship over the past three decades.

The authors find that historical deforestation has substantially altered regional observed precipitation over the southern Amazon basin through inter-regional atmospheric moisture transport, which is underestimated in current climate models.

Greening—increasing leaf area index—affects regional climate in a number of contradictory ways. The net global effect is now revealed to be cooling that has offset the equivalent of 12% of global land-surface warming over the past 30 years.

Extreme events driven by long-term variations in precipitation, temperature and vapour pressure deficit often result in greater losses in ecosystem productivity than short-term extremes, according to an analysis of global eddy covariance flux data from 1995 to 2020.

The relationship between terrestrial carbon sinks and atmospheric modes of variability remains uncertain. Here, the authors show that the coupling of the North Atlantic Oscillation and East-Atlantic patterns explains variations in the European CO₂sink from 1982 to 2012.

The impact of land-use and cover-change (LUCC) on ecosystem carbon stock in China is poorly known due to large biases in existing databases. Here the authors develop a new LUCC database with corrected false signals and reveal that forest expansion is the dominant driver of China’s recent carbon sink.

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could stimulate plant photosynthesis and production. However, using the measurements from global eddy-covariance sites, this study shows that continued increases in atmospheric aridity in the future will counteract most of this fertilization effect.

Forest planting is considered a natural climate solution, but effects on soil carbon are unclear. This study, in northern China, finds that planting forests increases carbon in soils poor in it and vice versa.

Satellite records combined with global ecosystem models show a persistent and widespread greening over 25–50% of the global vegetated area; less than 4% of the globe is browning. CO₂ fertilization explains 70% of the observed greening trend.

Using a global coupled biogeochemistry–climate model and a chemistry and transport model reveals that China’s present-day global radiative forcing is about ten per cent of the current global total, made up of both warming and cooling contributions; if in the future China reduces the cooling forcings, global warming could accelerate.

The authors present a 3.5-million-year-long pollen record from the Zoige Basin of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, 3,442 m above sea level. The ~5,000 pollen assemblages retrieved from the core reveal many ecosystem transitions during this time and, when correlated with climatic curves, indicate what effects future warming may have on regional vegetation.

Climate oscillations, such as El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), play a key role in global and regional crop yield variations. The authors analysed crop yield data in China from 1980 to 2017 and found that ENSO affects yield not only through local climate variability but also by driving migratory crop pest outbreaks, highlighting an overlooked pathway by which ENSO drives yield loss.

Satellite data show declining global forest recovery from tree mortality since the 1990s, driven by warming and water scarcity. Canopy water recovers slower than greenness, stressing the need for a multifaceted approach to assessing recovery.

Combining eddy covariance measurements and satellite observations, the authors identify an optimum air temperature for global vegetation productivity and show that it is consistently lower than the optimum foliar photosynthetic capacity.

Accelerated storage of terrestrial carbon during the slow warming period (1998–2012) can be predominantly attributed to lower land-use emissions due to decreased tropical forest loss and increased afforestation in the northern temperate regions.

To explore how climate warming may affect rice yield, a study used field experiments and three modelling approaches to examine the sensitivity of rice yield to warming. The study predicts that severe rice yield losses are likely to occur without effective crop improvement.

The authors investigate the impacts of drought legacy on springtime leaf unfolding and green-up. They show that drought delays springtime phenology, primarily through exogenous environmental memory effects, and suggest that future spring advances may be dampened by increasing drought.

Afforestation is often used to increase terrestrial carbon sequestration and restore ecosystem services. Here, the authors show that afforestation can also neutralize soil pH by lowering pH in alkaline soil but raising pH in acid soil, thus further promoting the restoration of ecosystem functions.

The upper paleo-range limit of trees dictates the endemic habitat of alpine trees. Here, the authors combine satellite, dendrochronological, fossil pollen, and paleoclimate data to create a model that reconstructs the upper range limit of trees through the last 22 thousand years on the Tibetan Plateau.

Climate change is inducing widespread shifts in the phenology of terrestrial organisms. This global analysis reveals a growing asymmetry between plant and animal responses, with more pronounced phenological shifts in plants.

Global potential forestation could provide about 0.06 °C of biophysical cooling, yet this benefit is expected to diminish as atmospheric CO₂ increases, primarily because background climate shifts weaken the non-local cooling mechanisms.

Arid regions are projected to expand in the future. An ensemble of climate model simulations reveals that limiting anthropogenic warming to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C can markedly reduce the area undergoing, and thus the population exposed to, aridification.

To meet growing food demands without expanding cropland area, much of the North China Plain has moved from single to double annual cropping. Now, research shows that this change in agricultural management alters biophysical feedbacks to the climate in such a way that they can amplify summertime climate changes over East Asia.

The sediment load of China’s Yellow River has been declining. Analysis of 60 years of runoff and sediment load data attributes this decline to river engineering, with an increasing role of post-1990s land use changes on the Loess Plateau.

Observed northern extratropical land greening is consistent with anthropogenic forcings, where greenhouse gases play a dominant role, but not with simulations that include only natural forcings and internal climate variability.

Regions such as the United States, the Amazon and Southern Europe are hot spots in wildfire research, while Africa and Siberia with the largest burned areas are largely understudied, according to an analysis of more than 60,000 peer-reviewed articles over 1982-2022 using a large language model.

Managing natural systems to mitigation climate change is a key strategy for limiting warming. In China, such natural climate solutions could offset 6% of CO₂ emissions during 2020–2030, contributing to mitigation goals but highlighting the importance of emissions reductions.

The authors show China’s forests can sequester 172.3 million tons of carbon per year in biomass by 2100, with an additional 28.1 million tons from improved management practices, but neglecting wood harvest impacts will distort long-term future projections.

This study finds that vegetation greening is expected to exacerbate compound soil drought-heat extreme events, as enhanced transpiration during the early growing season depletes soil moisture leading to deficits in the subsequent warm season.

Combining long-term atmospheric CO₂ records with satellite observations of vegetation activities across the Northern Hemisphere, the authors identify a weakening trend of the link between spring and summer productivity over the past 40 years.

Using multiple remote-sensing datasets, the authors show that temporal and spatial scale influence the detection of tree-mortality events and explain why there has been a seemingly conflicting pattern of both overall greening but also extensive tree mortality in recent decades.

Large uncertainties remain in Earth system models in predicting soil carbon-climate feedbacks. Here, the authors constrained projected soil carbon changes in ESMs using observation-derived data, and found that global soil will become a carbon source under future warming.

Short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs) are thought to have short-term impacts relative to CO₂. A compact Earth system model estimates SLCFs have caused substantial, long-term impacts via carbon–climate feedbacks since the pre-industrial era but species-dependent impacts of opposite sign largely cancel.